I was walking down campus here in Berkeley the other day, along a path I tread often, indeed everyday, and I found this gem of a statement written in chalk on the road.
"Breathe! You are alive!" the writer said, with two little hearts drawn on either side of the words.
I continued walking, but the two sentences reverberated in my head. It was a simple statement of course. I mean, what could be simpler? Breathe, because you are alive. Well, duh! Of course I am breathing, won't I be dead if I didn't?
But then, how often do we think of the fact that we are alive? Alive, as opposed to dead, as opposed to inanimate, a pointless existence that just goes from one day to the next as the earth goes around the sun? Alive, as opposed to a stone that sits there, silent, till it is kicked about; alive, as opposed to dead, as most of the universe is; a cold lifeless place, most of it, with perhaps only the third small planet from a medium sized star capable of giving birth to life.
Life! What a miracle it is! Don't you see? You and I are part of miracles! Living, breathing miracles! How beautiful and magnificent are those millions of cells that pervade our body, constantly metabolizing, with their elaborate machinery of nuclei and mitochondria and ribosomes and DNA, a whole factory packed in a system so small it would put the best engineer to shame! How beautiful the lungs, full of tiny balloons to allow diffusion of oxygen as the blood passes behind the thin walls, how amazing the notion of diaphragm that goes in and out, up and down to control intake and outgo, and how wonderful to know that even as I am writing this and you are reading this the whole machinery is going on and on, lub dub, lub dub, a wonderful incessant machine bringing in the precious fuel of oxygen, itself left behind by the sudden appearance several million years ago of a breed of creatures capable of actually storing energy, actually holding onto the sun's fusion; the best solar cells there are. And how wild that this energy all comes from the heart of a star that is such a huge explosion in the making, one of the strongest creative forces in the universe!
And not just life, but life capable of understanding itself! Life that has tiny little cells holding hands in such incredibly complicated patterns as to appear completely random, while at the same time giving the appearance of exquisite design: I am talking of the brain of course, the mother, quite literally, of all machines and all machinations humankind has ever concocted, all of art history culture literature science and this post itself emanating from that cosmologically tiny mass of grey cells in what to the best of minds seems an almost unsurnmountable enigma! And how inspiring to know that just one such a mass of grey cells somewhere, that one such miraculous creature hardly a few cosmological instants ago, took a piece of chalk and scribbled on the road what he felt inspiring, and me, an apparently unrelated creature, should stare at the statement and feel inspired enough to write this post, inspired enough to share with you....
Inspiration! What could be more miraculous than the fact that happiness and beauty and hope and creativity can flow like water from mind to mind and creation to creation, as if we were all part of just one huge canvas, one impeccable story that stretches as much through space as it does through time, as much through perception as through imagination; as if, as Walt Whitman said, we are all just part of one powerful play; each of us contributing a verse. Not just any verse, mind, but a verse, of the most powerful play in existence:
Life.
And you say you are insignificant, that you can find no meaning, that you are bored and disinterested in life. But how can you be? You are alive, isn't that enough? You are a living, breathing miracle.
So breathe. Because you are alive.
Now go inspire someone.
"Breathe! You are alive!" the writer said, with two little hearts drawn on either side of the words.
I continued walking, but the two sentences reverberated in my head. It was a simple statement of course. I mean, what could be simpler? Breathe, because you are alive. Well, duh! Of course I am breathing, won't I be dead if I didn't?
But then, how often do we think of the fact that we are alive? Alive, as opposed to dead, as opposed to inanimate, a pointless existence that just goes from one day to the next as the earth goes around the sun? Alive, as opposed to a stone that sits there, silent, till it is kicked about; alive, as opposed to dead, as most of the universe is; a cold lifeless place, most of it, with perhaps only the third small planet from a medium sized star capable of giving birth to life.
Life! What a miracle it is! Don't you see? You and I are part of miracles! Living, breathing miracles! How beautiful and magnificent are those millions of cells that pervade our body, constantly metabolizing, with their elaborate machinery of nuclei and mitochondria and ribosomes and DNA, a whole factory packed in a system so small it would put the best engineer to shame! How beautiful the lungs, full of tiny balloons to allow diffusion of oxygen as the blood passes behind the thin walls, how amazing the notion of diaphragm that goes in and out, up and down to control intake and outgo, and how wonderful to know that even as I am writing this and you are reading this the whole machinery is going on and on, lub dub, lub dub, a wonderful incessant machine bringing in the precious fuel of oxygen, itself left behind by the sudden appearance several million years ago of a breed of creatures capable of actually storing energy, actually holding onto the sun's fusion; the best solar cells there are. And how wild that this energy all comes from the heart of a star that is such a huge explosion in the making, one of the strongest creative forces in the universe!
And not just life, but life capable of understanding itself! Life that has tiny little cells holding hands in such incredibly complicated patterns as to appear completely random, while at the same time giving the appearance of exquisite design: I am talking of the brain of course, the mother, quite literally, of all machines and all machinations humankind has ever concocted, all of art history culture literature science and this post itself emanating from that cosmologically tiny mass of grey cells in what to the best of minds seems an almost unsurnmountable enigma! And how inspiring to know that just one such a mass of grey cells somewhere, that one such miraculous creature hardly a few cosmological instants ago, took a piece of chalk and scribbled on the road what he felt inspiring, and me, an apparently unrelated creature, should stare at the statement and feel inspired enough to write this post, inspired enough to share with you....
Inspiration! What could be more miraculous than the fact that happiness and beauty and hope and creativity can flow like water from mind to mind and creation to creation, as if we were all part of just one huge canvas, one impeccable story that stretches as much through space as it does through time, as much through perception as through imagination; as if, as Walt Whitman said, we are all just part of one powerful play; each of us contributing a verse. Not just any verse, mind, but a verse, of the most powerful play in existence:
Life.
And you say you are insignificant, that you can find no meaning, that you are bored and disinterested in life. But how can you be? You are alive, isn't that enough? You are a living, breathing miracle.
So breathe. Because you are alive.
Now go inspire someone.
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